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“From the user perspective, it looks like everyone is moved to Teams, but the Skype for Business servers are still up,” Hafezi says. Microsoft Teams largely took over these responsibilities, but certain communications existed only on Skype for Business and its infrastructure. “Now we’re in a situation where backends and little groups are using Skype for Business and they might not even know it.”Ī large enterprise like Microsoft requires specialized tools for all the calls, chats, meetings, and collaboration that takes place with different internal and external parties. “Initially we wanted to make sure we weren’t impacting sales or teams with specific feature needs,” says Farnaz Hafezi, a program manager with the Seamless Teamwork team in Microsoft Digital who helped coordinate the migration of several teams. Farnaz Hafezi guided several efforts in the process of decommissioning Skype for Business, including coordinating communications with external partners who might be affected. Most of this work could be done in parallel, but certain areas took much longer than initially estimated. “When we evaluated those buckets, we then assigned them to quarters based on what we thought we could do during our projected timelines.” “These other users or services couldn’t be moved because they were either dependent on a service or they opted out during the grace period,” Kovach says. At launch, Microsoft Teams didn’t include all the features and functionality that Skype for Business did, which created unique circumstances and exceptions for decommissioning Skype for Business. “Those buckets were then further dissected to determine what could be accomplished now versus what couldn’t be done due to product limitations.”Ĭertain users could be moved to Microsoft Teams without much disruption because they had a status of “No Dependency,” meaning the user’s day-to-day activities didn’t rely on features exclusive to Skype for Business. “We mapped everything out that we knew about from a service perspective and put it into buckets,” Kovach says. Most of Microsoft’s migration to Microsoft Teams was fairly textbook. But we found that some users were still dependent on Skype for Business.” “Teams was going to be more reliable and perform better, which drove the goal of migration. “We had an opportunity to be the first Microsoft Teams customer, and that’s important,” Kovach says. The arrival of a new service changed Microsoft Digital’s perspective on decommissioning Skype for Business. Teams was more than just a chat and calling platform.” “Skype for Business didn’t have the cool stuff Teams did, the core components, like collaborative capabilities. – Scott Kovach, service engineer, Microsoft Digital
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We had an opportunity to be the first Microsoft Teams customer, and that’s important. “We were anticipating doing that in totality.” That was going to be our initial step,” Kovach says. “We wanted to get onto the cloud with Skype for Business Online. Moving to the cloud would help alleviate some of the bandwidth and asset-heavy requirements of Skype for Business on premises, improving the experience for the employees who used the service and the engineers who supported it.
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“We were anticipating a full move to the cloud, essentially a lift and load, removing the server infrastructure ownership burden on IT and instead leveraging Skype for Business Online.” “We had infrastructure pools built across multiple regions like North America, Singapore, Asia Pacific, and India,” Kovach says.
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In keeping up with the company’s digital transformation needs, Microsoft Digital needed to update the service to support a modern, cloud-based enterprise. Skype for Business used to be a central tool for communication at Microsoft. Fortunately, Microsoft Digital, the organization that powers, transforms, and protects Microsoft, has developed specific communication and migration strategies for decommissioning Skype for Business. Phasing out the communication platform has taken a fair amount of time and effort. “Once this is all complete, we can see the benefit of retiring our old assets,” Kovach says. Some of these features are necessary for interacting with external partners, so prematurely moving these users to Microsoft Teams could disrupt operations. “The reality is, we are about 95 percent of the way there.”Ī subset of employees relies on the specific functions within Skype for Business to complete their work. “A lot of customers think we’ve completed the migration,” says Scott Kovach, a service engineer for Microsoft Digital. Just a few more special lines of business to go, and then all of Microsoft will be able to benefit from the better performance and collaboration capabilities found in Microsoft Teams. It’s been a long journey, but decommissioning Skype for Business on premises across Microsoft is complete.